‘The Horse,’ by Wendy Williams

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By Jaimy Gordon

Dec. 11, 2015

In June 1976, a friend of mine and I, passing through Virginia on our way back to Brown, went for a hike in the Smokies, where black bears live. Although my friend would soon become a distinguished science writer, one of the pleasures of our friendship was scaring each other silly. We kept joking about those bears. Halfway up Mount Rogers, we got caught in a thunderstorm and took shelter under a rock face that leaned into canopy. It was a fine hide-out, but it was not ours alone. Under our feet we saw the scat of a large animal, copious and dark — and fresh. Never mind the lightning; we ran.

The trail rose into meadow where we were greeted by the actual authors of that dung, about 20 wild ponies, shaggy and mud-caked. They made us nervous, bumping up against us like groupies, but what we felt for them, as the sun came out — animals five or six times our size, who sought our company but could be depended upon not to eat us — was love.

Love is the driver for ­Wendy Williams’s new book, “The Horse.” What she calls “our love affair with horses” is at least as old as a tiny (1 inch by 2 inches) ivory horse from the Vogelherd cave in Germany, one of the oldest works of art by a human. “Across 35 millennia, you can almost hear him snort and see him toss his head.” His ice age sculptor, who feared lions and cave bears, must have loved the graceful horse at least in part for its vegetarian bias. Williams is surely right: “This ivory carver spent a lot of time watching wild horses.” Her mission is to persuade us to do the same.

The author promises “a scientific travelogue, a biography of the horse and a worldwide investigation into the bond that unites horses and humans,” and she delivers all three in this restless, surprisingly compact book, but she can’t quite clinch her hypothesis: that horses and humans are bound to one another in a fashion that “is somehow encoded in our genes.” Although she has ridden horses all her life, Williams is ready to relinquish the horse’s usefulness to humans as the best guarantee of its future. In her world, watching wild horses will be enough.

We have studied horses the better to work them, breed them, race them. The time has come, Williams argues, to observe the social behavior of free-roaming horses systematically, over the long term. The science of horse ethology is in its infancy, but has already dispelled certain myths. Williams eschews the old term “harem” because the stallion is less fully the boss of his little band than we used to think. One horse ethologist she visits “believes that only about half the foals in the bands he studied are sired by the band’s closely associated stallion.” Meanwhile, the mares are running the show: “Far from subordinate, mares frequently initiate the band’s activities. The stallions are quite often little more than hangers-on.”

Visiting fossil deposits worldwide, interviewing a daunting roster of paleontologists, Williams retells the story of the modern horse. Eohippus, the collie-size, leaf-eating dawn horse, might well have originated there in Wyoming, in a hot wet rain forest at the foot of the nascent Rockies, not far from where Williams is watching wild mustangs 56 million years later. From this cradle of the Eocene came as well the earliest known primate fossils. That we have a “stem” ancestor in common is “the reason why we can learn to understand each other so well,” she says. I’m not convinced. We primates are in fact closer, in evolutionary sequence, to leporids and rodents than to horses, but rarely brag about our harmony with rabbits, much less rats. Still, it’s a story worth repeating, to stress the adaptability, undemanding diet and sheer evolutionary good luck (so far) of our equine ­companions.

She visits mustachioed Garranos in the gorse scrub of Spanish Galicia, Pottoks in the Pyrenees and “rewilded” ­Przewalskis on the Mongolian steppe. Free-roaming horses, Williams says, now exist in the millions. Wild or feral? “Free-roaming” is the term of choice, for none of these horses, not even the untamable Przewalskis, would be where they are today without some form of human intervention in their histories. Our understanding of domestication itself has changed: It is probable that bands of wild horses, under stress of climate change some 6,000 years ago, attracted by the cleared fields and relative safety of human settlements, came near enough to half-domesticate themselves. Humans merely completed the job. Our job now is to set horses free again.

Williams is a horse lover and an optimist. She trusts that there will always be horses, and that more and more of them will roam free, to the edification of human observers who leave them otherwise unmolested. Alas, I can’t quite share her faith. I later learned that those wild ponies who mobbed my friend and me on Mount Rogers were recent transplants from overcrowded Assateague Island, already too hopelessly corrupted by sandwiches from tourists to keep their proper free-roaming distance. And I have seen too many racetracks shut down when they were not granted slot machines to hold the attention of bettors for the 20 minutes between races, when the humans had nothing to do but watch the horses — beautiful, eloquent horses — such a bore! Still, though I won’t ride money on it, I hope I am wrong and Wendy ­Williams is right about everything in this affectionate, thoroughgoing, good-hearted book.